Tuesday, March 29, 2005

OPERATORS of payment systems will be licensed by the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB), Parliament resolved on March 18, approving the second reading of provisions of the Money Transfers, Electronic Payment Instruments and Payment Systems Bill. Read more in
this article.

The average price of basic banking services in the 2005 report is €78, with prices between countries ranging from €25 in the Netherlands to €137 in Switzerland, which is a 1:5.5 range. Prices differ in terms of cost for consumers depending on the level of maturity of the banking environment and the banking environment pricing model.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

See this article. Clearly the position of GSM Europe is to ask for less regulation in exchange for which they promise more jobs in Europe.

An advanced mobile telecommunications infrastructure is a key catalyst to stimulating growth and creating jobs in Europe, yet the required investments are both long term and not without risk. Ever increasing regulation becomes a disincentive to investment. GSM Europe welcomes the Commission's commitment to clamp down on over-regulation, and will actively contribute to impact assessments in order to deliver less regulation, common-sense regulation and better regulation.

Duh !

My mobile phone fees are staggering and off-the scale and I'm pretty sure that that's not leading to more jobs in EU but to more profit for share-holders...

Informative paper about Botnets with the title: Know your Enemy: Tracking Botnets.
In this paper we look at a special kind of threat: the individuals and organizations who run botnets. A botnet is a network of compromised machines that can be remotely controlled by an attacker.

Electronic payment processor TSYS said Thursday it has signed a seven-year deal with the largest bank in the Netherlands, making it the company's first major banking client on continental Europe.
See this article.

Paypal in the meantime has sent me a thank-you note (which my provider automatically put in my SPAM-box by the way.....):Thank you for contacting PayPal. We appreciate you bringing this suspicious email to our attention. We can confirm that the email you received was not sent to you by PayPal. The website linked to this email is not a registered URL authorized or used by PayPal. We are currently investigating this incident fully. Please do not enter any personal or financial information into this website.

And the bottom of their mail says:PayPal and its representatives will NEVER ask you to reveal your password. There are NO EXCEPTIONS to this policy. If anyone claiming to work for PayPal asks for your password under any circumstances, by emailor by phone, please refuse and immediately contact us via webform at https://www.paypal.com/wf/f=sa_pass.

Last few days the very famous Digital Money Conference of Consult Hyperion took place. Bits and pieces of the discussions are now scattered over the web:Silicon for example reports:

Speaking at the Consult Hyperion Digital Money Forum in London today, Monika Hartmann of the European Central Bank's e-money observatory said that 0.1 per cent of cash in circulation in January 2005 is electronic. "It cannot be called such a big success," she said. According Hartmann, e-cash can't take off until providers crack the issue of how an individual could repay the fiver he borrowed from a friend without having cash: "We have observed at European level that e-purses proved more successful in some countries than others - Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg.... There's a lot of person to person schemes coming up. If we had more peer-to-peer capability, it would be thrilling."

And the EPSO-news bulletin in turn quotes David Birch:

Banks gave the electronic purse a try back in the 1990s, but largely abandoned their efforts when the products failed to gain any real traction in the marketplace. But new technology means that the e-purse is back again with more potential for success, and it isn't only banks that are playing with it, says David Birch, a director at Consult Hyperion. Gift cards and prefunded brand cards issued by Starbucks and 7-Eleven are, he says, proving very successful in the United States (gift cards are reported to account for more than 8% of retail transaction value in the United States already), with hybrid cards (i.e. prepaid debit and credit cards) in the United States forecasted to have more than a third of the e-purse market by 2007, according to TowerGroup. Contactless payment and electronic ticketing systems (such as Oyster in London and Octopus in Hong Kong) are proving particularly effective on transport networks. More and more organisers of concert, sporting and other events around the world are also opting for these systems. Contactless payment services offer, among other things, speed and convenience and, according to David Birch, the next few years may well see prepaid and pre-authorised contactless (i.e., e-purse) volumes surpass debit card volumes.

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

See: http://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=9501Tokyo (JCNN) - East Japan Railway (JR East) will join forces with NTT DoCoMo and Sony to launch a new mobile Suica smartcard service in January 2006. The partners will conduct a trial service beginning in March using pilot service-compatible handsets.

The new service will combine JR East's Suica smartcard functions with DoCoMo i-mode cellphones enabled by Sony's FeliCa smartcard platform. IC chips for the service and service applications will be developed by FeliCa Networks, a joint venture established by the three companies. The service will allow users to check the fare balance, recharge e-money fares, and buy a commuter pass whenever and wherever from their handsets, as well as enjoying the basic Suica smartcard functions.

JR East plans on service expansion by making the service available for online shopping (by the second half of 2006) and for purchasing Shinkansen bullet train tickets (in fiscal 2007).